Improved US Government

Great Debates
21

I’d like to see a Line-Item Veto for the President.

On your first point the requirements for getting on a ballot are well defined and open to all. No one can keep you off if you jump through the proper hoops which are the exact same hoops republicans and democrats jump through. They just have the organization to make the whole thing look easy. I’d say the problem here is more the press that doesn’t give much attention to third party candidates.

As to your second point I think it’s been discussed above that this could be considered unconstitutional. Say you’re running for president and you want to spend $1 million of your OWN money. You have a right to say what you please protected by the Constitution…if I said you could only spend $500,000 I’m restricting your freedom to get your message out and that’s a no-no.

Gadarene
I really like your Black Box approach but it doesn’t address issues of Soft Money which seems to be where the real influence is coming from anyway. In 1907 it became illegal for corporations to spend money in federal elections and in 1947 it became illegal for labor unions to do the same. In 1974 individual contributions were capped at $1,000 to a candidate and/or $20,000 to a political party in a year. This is all of the money your Clearinghouse would take care of.

Unfortunately the $100,000+ donations go to PAC’s and issue advocacy. Candidate X doesn’t need to know that Corp. Y gave $500,000 dollars but Candidate X had better give access to PAC Z that provided millions in advertising and advocacy in support of their campaign. Corp. Y practically owns PAC Z so with some not so hidden footwork access is still maintained.

22

Jeff: The ballot access requirements are prohibitively difficult, and it’s demonstrably a result of collusion between the two major parties to limit the field. I posted some links to this on another thread; I’ll see if I can find them.

I’d say the Black Box system does work for soft money–it would be received anonymously just like any other contribution. I’d rescind the limits, too, for individual contributions, partially to make the damn thing more likely to pass. In my ideal world, corporations would be unable to give money, period, but you’d still have problems with bundling. You do have a point about the issue advocacy ads, which are (ostensibly) done without the knowledge or participation of the candidate. But if the ads are truly anonymous–as they’re supposed to be–then no access can be given, since the candidate doesn’t know to whom to give it. And corporate PACs…hmm. Again, short of getting rid of 'em, you just have to ensure that the candidates don’t know who’s behind the advertising; not even the name of the PAC.

This Black Box thing is a tricky business, but I think it’s one of the more practical ways to go if we want to remove the influence of money on politics.

23

IMO, the first one is patently unconstitutional owing to First Amendment concerns. The second . . . well, I don’t see as it changes much from an election standpoint. One could still win an election by concentrating their campaigning entirely in a few large population centers.

24

Xeno, I’m not sure how we can fundamentally change the political parties - anything as big as the Repubs and the Dems organizations will be hard to change. But I think the forums for putting forth ideas to congress must be improved, specifically to allow any interested party to propose legislation (or removal of it). I’m not sure how we can accomplish this, or if it is truly practical, since there is potential of tying up the congress in endless proposals. But there is a definate barrier for ideas from outside the two major parties. We now have the very clearly defined thinking of both sides, but nothing else can enter the picture.

I like some of the proposed solutions to our major problems, but there is a lack of any new ideas, and a lack of access to them.

Introducing new political parties with some power behind them is possible (a la Perot), so this may be another valid approach. But I don’t believe that someone must be a member of a party, movement, organizations, etc. to have good ideas. So a way to put forth the ideas of any person is what I’m talking about. Something like the SDMB of Politics.

Sili

25

No one mentioned any thoughts on a Line Item Veto! Good idea? Bad idea? Totally indifferent idea?

Define prohibitively difficult. Frankly I don’t know what the requirements are so I’m really asking here and not just trying to be a pain. I’d look it up myself but that’ll have to wait till later as I don’t have the time right now. If anyone has the answer off the top of their head so much the better.

To some extent I believe the process should be difficult. You’re talking about running for an office that represents the entire United States. Merely having the thousand people in your local church think you’re a swell guy shouldn’t be enough. I guess the question is where do you draw the line to keep all but the most serious candidates out while not becoming so restrictive as to circumvent the democratic ideal?

26

Yeah, I agree with Phil (!). I can see the impetus behind getting rid of exit polls–IMHO, they do a hell of a lot of damage to the electoral process. Hell, this infatuation with polling in general has done more than any other single thing to turn our elections into horse races. But it’s not really practical to eliminate exit polls, not unless you could show clearly the damage that was being done. The Court wouldn’t buy it–not this court, anyway.

As for doing away with the electoral college…why? That seems as cosmetic a change as the perennially-proposed flag-burning amendment. The electoral college is pretty much the appendix of the American democratic process, anyway.

If you really want to tackle issues of federalism, work on eliminating the tyranny of the minority extant in the U.S. Senate. With each state guaranteed two seats regardless of population, and with the Senate controlling most of the important congressional responsibilities…you get a situation where states with 20% of the overall population represent over 50% of the Senate.

Now, personally, I think a valuable–though admittedly unlikely–reform would be to make the Senate a national legislature, its members elected, non-regionally, by the whole country through proportional representation party-list voting. Alternatively, the Senate could consist of 50 state delegates–one from each state–and 50 at-large delegates, to be elected on a national basis.

Food for thought, anyway.

27

I’ve long felt another political party was needed in the US (from my standpoint that’d be an economically conservative, socially liberal party but that’s just me). However, there is a caveat you should be aware of.

A three party system can skew to a rule by the minority. Say the Republicans have 45% of Congress and the Democrats another 45% leaving the Reform party the remaining 10%. This can drop undue power on the 10% as they frequently find themselves the swing vote between the other two. This in itself might be ok but frequently the swing vote may go to whichever party promises more in the horsetrading that goes on before a vote. I.e. Reformer to Repub: “I couldn’t give a crap either way about the marriage tax but I have a bill for a nifty new Ice Cream factory in one of our home districts that’ll bring jobs. Give me your vote on that and I’ll see that the Marriage Tax you want revoked goes your way.”

This is by no means a foregone conclusion but it is something you have to watch out for in a three party system.

28

**

I actually think something trivial like having at least 1% support in some previously agreed upon poll, or perhaps 10,000 signatures nationwide. I think that the bar should be set as low as possible. Putting more names on the ballot doesn’t cost anything, and having more people in a debate just means a few more podiums.
xenophon41 said:

Here’s the plan. Every political party contributes $1 per member to an advertising fund. That’s the cost of being a political party. In return, in election season, every Monday, and every Saturday, during the evening news programs, you get 1 30 second spot. The time is yours to do what you wish. You want to show fuzzy puppies? No problem. Call your opponents devil-worshipping scumbags? Go ahead.

I doubt the fund would have enough money to completely cover the cost of the time, so perhaps the government kicks in some, or maybe 1$ per member isn’t enough. The government can also negotiate better prices with the networks.

This means that the large parties subsidize the smaller ones to a certain degree. I think that’s fair enough in order to ensure a broadly inclusive electoral process.

[Jeff_42 said:

I didn’t say this was the only advertising you could do. Just that every political party was guranteed a certain minimum of national advertising. If you want to spend more, then go ahead.

gEEk

29

I like a lot of these ideas about campaign finance reform. Here are some additional thoughts:

The two big money problems in this issue are 1) candidates with more money can win just by outspending those with less, and 2) candidates can get the needed money by being “bought” by big contributors. I don’t think either of those problems is something we need to, or will be able to, wipe out completely. Richer candidates will never submit to being held entirely level with poor ones in their expenditures, and some politicians will always be sleazeballs for sale to the highest bidder. What I think is crucially necessary is not aiming for perfect equality and integrity but guaranteeing that the little guys get a fighting chance. Qualified candidates don’t need a perfectly level playing field as long as they get reasonable levels of exposure and access.

That means that there will have to be public financing of campaigns, which I think is reasonable: after all, all PR/public service information from the government about what politicians are doing once they’re in office is produced on the public’s dime, and I think information about politicians when they’re trying to get into office is equally important. A worthwhile experimental model might be the new Maine Clean Election Act, which awards qualified candidates campaigning money if they commit to accepting no other campaign funding (a nice selling point, too).

To keep clean-money candidates from being absolutely swamped in the ad blitz from lobby-financed ones, we’re going to have to resign ourselves to some restrictions on political advertising. I think, though, that these should be tightest on the advertising media that are most ubiquitous and most expensive: that means TV for the most part (possibly radio too, and billboards?). Those ads should be, as somebody else has proposed, publicly funded, equally allotted, and randomly selected for display. This would leave candidates free to exercise their First Amendment rights on the more arduous ways of reaching the public (pamphleting, door-to-door, etc.).

There should also be publicly- or nonprofit-funded distribution of information about candidates in a standard format for easy comparison, as Project Vote Smart is starting to do (and as the League of Women Voters has been doing for a while). This would include debates, which as many posters have pointed out should be made more accessible to small-party candidates. (Couldn’t we maybe have a kind of round-robin sequence of debates if there are too many candidates to debate at the same time? It would be tricky to determine “winners” to go on to subsequent debates, but it might appeal to the American sporting spirit. :))

Gad’s “black-box” approach to campaign contributions sounds like a good idea, but I don’t think it will be possible or necessary to make the donations totally anonymous—clever buyers and sellers will always be able to establish contact with each other. What I suggest is scooping a nice healthy “processing-fee” percentage off the top of contributions, and using the money for the public campaign financing described above. Maybe make the fee scale progressive, so that the more you give to “your” candidates, the bigger a chunk of it gets distributed among all the candidates. That might tone down somewhat donors’ enthusiasm for making big contributions, too.

For my next post: an examination of the proposal that we actually need more federal representatives. (No, listen! Wait, don’t throw that! It’s not really a wild-eyed liberal big-government scheme, but is based on the premise that as our citizen-to-representative ratio has mounted well above that of most European nations our politicians have become less accountable to their constituencies, and that more reps with stronger constituent ties and less bloated staffs might even save us money as well as governing more effectively.)

30

Here’s the big problem with all these campaign finance reforms. Political speech is the cornerstone of the first amendment protection of freedom of speech. That’s what the constitution was written to protect…not the right to make porno movies. So if I stand on the street corner saying, “Vote Lemur in 2000”, that is constitutionally protected. If I print pamphlets saying, “Vote Lemur in 2000”, that is protected. If I go on the radio, TV, billboards, posters, skywriting, internet, etc, etc,…all this political speech is constitutinally protected.

It’s all very well and good to say that you can’t give money to a candidate. But you can’t stop third party ads. How can in be constitutional to stop, say, the Sierra Club from running ads and sending out mailings endorsing, say, Gore? Or the NRA running ads in support of Bush?

If we shut down campaign contributions then we’ll just have hordes of third party campaigns. Instead of ads being paid for and produced by the candidate, they will be produced by unaccountable shadow organizations.

31

I am for changes in voting procedures that result in more accurate representation of the choices of the voters. Preference voting and proportional representation have been mentioned here, and I’ve done some reading on approval voting and declared strategy voting. (I’ll post some informational links if anyone is interested.) Each has its good and bad points, but they all address well the problems of the current voting system in used in most elections in this country.

I am looking forward to Kimstu’s proposal for more federal representatives, especially if accompanied by “less bloated staffs.” I hope also accompanied by less bloated beauracracies. In trying to find ways to improve our elected officials, let’s not forget what a small percentage of the government they actually are. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were over 2.7 million civilian federal government employees as of March 1999. Maybe we should look for ways to ensure that these people are accountable to us, and represent our interests and not their own.

32

Gilligan: I love the idea of approval voting. Anything which stops people from thinking they’re “wasting their vote” on a smaller-party candidate. For those who don’t know, approval voting entails each voter being able to vote for as many candidates on a given ballot as he/she likes. Each vote is counted once, and whichever candidate has the most aggregate votes in the general election wins. It appeals to my desire to get rid of the stupid either/or dichotomy so prevalent in politics and the media. The whole “are you for it or against it?”, only two sides to every issue thing. Bleah.

33

I’m waiting for that information on Proportional voting, myself. I’m worried that this is going to basically shift power from being somewhat evenly spread, to centered in big population centers. Like, California would control most of the congress.

34

Not unless American political parties were regionally based. Proportional representation just means that above a certain threshold (usually around 5 percent), the share of the vote that a particular political party gets (district-wide, state-wide, nation-wide, whatever) will correspond to the number of seats they are accorded in the legislature. So if the Reform Party got 12 percent of the congressional vote in one state this November, but didn’t win any one district outright, then they would be allocated 12 percent (or as close to 12 percent as possible, mathematically) of that state’s representatives to Congress.

Like I said, the problem with implementing this system 'round these parts is that it requires more than two strong and distinct political parties. We’ve only got the two, and they ain’t all that distinct. :smiley: Since representative votes in a PR system are usually done on a party-list basis (that is, a party submits a list of candidates who are standing for election, and the number elected depends upon the percentage of the vote gained), we’d need to be pretty clear about exactly what each political party stands for, rather than just each politician.

35

I don’t understand why people feel the need to mention that hypothetical changes in our governmental system would be unconstitutional. You can’t change the government without changing the laws and that is all that the Constitution is: the basic law of the land. It shouldn’t be necessary to add the caveat ( as xenophon41 did ) that a constitutional amendment would be included in those changes. It is not as if we are discussing how to go about enacting reform.

If you wish to argue that the right to free speech should overrule the right to unbiased government then fine, please do so. If you wish to argue that the government is not biased or even that no right to unbiased government exists then I am OK with that. But simply stating that a proposition is unconstitutional, IMO, does not add to the discussion.

As usual I find myself tending to agree with Gadarene’s positions, but I am a little disappointed in his characterization of the electeral college as unimportant. I do not believe that his proportional voting ideas would be implemented under this system of voting.
I am philosophically opposed to it as it blatantly removes the choice from the people. I find the idea that it is unlikely to contradict their wishes to be an extremely weak argument for keeping it around.

I also dislike the unrepresentational nature of the Senate. I thought of posting that sentiment here but I thought that my position that it should be eliminated as a factor might be viewed as too radical for the guidelines set out in the OP.
In a tip of the hat to the Constitution I would like to point out that while removing a states equal representation in the Senate is not allowed ( without its permision ), this does not mean that the amendment process could not be used to remove all authority from this body.

36

2sense: I think that for the purposes of this thread, people are objecting to the constitutionality of certain reforms because practicality was one of the conditions laid out in the OP. It’s a hell of a lot easier to foment change when you don’t have to go through an unwieldy amendment process to do so. That being said, I agree with you: the Constitution shouldn’t be considered sacrosanct merely by virtue of its being the Constitution. I know you’ve got major problems with the reverence automatically accorded to that there document, and I sympathize. :slight_smile: (Incidentally, have you ever read The Frozen Republic by Daniel Lazare? You’ll love it, guaranteed.)

As far as the electoral college goes, I guess I consider it non-democratic but not anti-democratic, if y’all see what I mean. That is to say, I don’t see it having an appreciable effect on the mechanics of the democratic structure today, not in the same way as soft money, winner-take-all elections, or equal state representation in the Senate.

In other words, I find the idea that it (the electoral college) hasn’t influenced the outcome of an election since 1876–and that for particular reasons–to be a strong enough argument not to worry about it before we can tackle the really pernicious, timely stuff. :wink:

2Sense, what’s your take on my idea of a mixed senate–one from each state, and fifty at-large?

37

Gadarene

I’m a bit vague on your reasons as to why a ‘mixed Senate’ is needed or worthwhile?

The point I see being made in support of your idea is that Rhode Island shouldn’t have equal weight with California.

Personally, however, I have no probelm with this as our current government is setup. The House has proportional representation so California swamps little Rhode Island there. However, the great idea of checks and balances our government is formed on is maintained by a Senate where little Rhode Island can stand up the ogre that is California (or Illinois or New York or whatever).

Without this you might get states like New York, Illinois and California saying, “We’re being buried in garbage and we decided that South Dakota is nice, big and empty so were gonna truck our crap there and dump it. South Dakota is free to register its displeasure in the house with its 2 (or whatever) measely votes.”

Also, who exactly are your 50 ‘at large’ Senators responsible to? At least now each Senator has a constituency he/she must answer to (albeit a large and therefore somewhat remote constituency). Still, this remoteness is good in my eyes as well. A House representative must answer to his/her district first, then their state and finally the country. A Senator has his/her state first and then the country. By being somewhat distant from their voters the Senate seems generally to take a longer view and broader view of what is good for the country as a whole (you can argue that they’re not very good at this anyway but I’d maintain they’re better at it than the House is).

38

First, this:

Jeff: *Gadarene, I’m a bit vague on your reasons as to why a ‘mixed Senate’ is needed or worthwhile? The point I see being made in support of your idea is that Rhode Island shouldn’t have equal weight with California. *

Hey!!! That unfairly discriminates against us Rhodys! Gadarene, how could you?!? :frowning: :wink:

Seriously, I think Jeff has a good point in that the Senate is supposed to avoid being a proportionally representative body, just as the UN is. If we had a much more heavily federalized government like France or someplace, that would be obviously unfair; but the US states have sufficient power and autonomy that they often function as little (well, some of us are littler than others) “sub-nations.” I don’t see what’s wrong with having a legislative chamber where they all meet on an equal footing: it’s another of our Constitutional dodges to evade a tyranny of the majority.

Now, back to the theme I promised. I can’t find the New Republic article from a decade ago or so that went into detail about reasons to increase the size of the House of Representatives, but I found a few comments about it on-line. A poli sci professor from Georgia makes the following arguments for increasing the statutory size of the chamber from 435 members to 650:

And the Center for Voting and Democracy points out:

(The per capita representation rates from these two sources also seem to be at odds, but you get the basic idea: we have very high citizen-to-congressperson ratios, and bumping up the size of the chamber by about 50% would significantly decrease them.) So the basic arguments in favor of the measure are:

  • smaller districts provide better and more direct representation and reduce voter alienation;
  • keeping in touch with the district would be correspondingly less arduous and the rep’s job would be more attractive to potential candidates;
  • since the House has about 20 committees averaging over 50 members each, reps serve on two or three different committees in addition to representing their constituents generally; having more reps would allow committee members to be more focused and better informed about their committee’s business;
  • smaller districts would enable reductions in congressional staffs;
  • smaller districts would mean cheaper elections that would be more accessible to potential candidates.

I can’t find the numbers I once saw estimating the actual savings of such a change, but I doubt that there could be a net reduction overall; increasing the size by nearly 50% might make Congress more cost-effective but there’d still be a larger number of salaries to pay. Still, I think there’s a case to be made that the other benefits of the change would make the cost worthwhile. (One handy advantage of this proposal is that, compared to some of the ideas discussed above which blithely suggest Constitutional amendments and so forth, it’s a relatively easy experiment: change one statute (though I can’t find out exactly which one at present) and see if we get a better government; if not, change the statute back and shrink the House again.)

39

This thread has been fastinating!!! However, rather than haggling over contributions, let’s go to the core of the issue. The Founding Fathers never invisioned the rise of the proffesional politician whose main focus is simply to remain in office. The accuisition and constant maintenence of the campaign “warchest” seems to me to fade away somewhat with the insertion of TERM LIMITS! In my mind, both houses thus being limited like the executive branch would allow the balance of power to be restored to the origional intent and concentrate time and energy to serving the people rather than self preservation!!!

What should the limits be? LOL! I open the floor!

40

Im enjoying this too, great ideas mostly. The idea of incresing the size of the House is a great idea (why didn’t iI think of that). I agree with Jeff and Kimstu on changing the Senate.
Phil_15:

I’ve never much bought into “term limits” as I thought that was the purpose of elections. Yes I know there is one for President, but the reasoning behind it is acceptable,imho.